Downhole operations are accomplished with bottom hole assemblies that include one or more tools that are positioned in the wellbore on a tubular string. Rigs of various types are available for assembling the tubular string using tongs to make up threaded joints when rigid tubing is used to support the bottom hole assembly (BHA).
Certain applications allow the use of coiled tubing which has advantages of elimination of the connections within the tubing itself and feeding the tubing off a coil into the wellbore. Many times when coiled tubing is to be used at a well site there is no rig available to make up threaded joints. While coiled tubing saves time otherwise used to make up joints in threaded rigid tubing by elimination of such joints, the reality is that the components of a bottom hole assembly that the coiled tubing will have to support are still connected with pin and box threaded connections. Some of these connections need to be made up fairly high in the air bringing a variety of safety issues into play. Making up connections in the bottom hole assembly that are threaded takes a long time and can become a significant cost to the well operator. In many cases specialized tong units are required to be mobilized to correctly make up said connections.
Quick connections have been used in conjunction with coiled tubing to connect associated signal and power electrical lines. Some examples of such auxiliary quick connections are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,601,652, 6,761,574 and 7,172,038. What has not been used before are non-threaded quick connections that can transmit torque in connection with making up components of a bottom hole assembly to each other. These and other aspects of the present invention will be more apparent to one of ordinary skill in this art from a review of the description of the preferred embodiment and the associated drawing while recognizing that the full scope of the invention is to be determined from the claims.